Thank you for joining us today. I will be speaking with Joe McQuaid, the chief operating officer of Family Fortune Financial. We’ll be talking about a core belief that I think everyone should have, which is access. The thought for the day when you listen to this episode, consider what type of access we provide and consider what type of access you want when it comes to your investments and your professionals that you have access to. And the action go out and get that access for yourself, because it is fundamental for you to grow and keep the wealth and your family.
I’m Joe McQuaid, chief operating officer, Family Fortune Financial. Today, joined by Erik Flagel, managing director of Family Fortune Financial.
Access
Today’s topic is access. What exactly do we mean by access?
When I talk about it, it’s very easy to kind of juxtapose access currently with access for the past 19 years, when I was at warehouses, and it really is the ability to access things. And in a typical kind of brokerage world, your access is limited to what they want to show you. And I know people will think, well, I can buy any stock I want to on a public market, and that’s true. But really, when you start thinking about packaged solutions, things like a mutual fund, annuity, things like that, they’re going to show those to you because they’re paid. They’re paid to show them to you, and the people are paid to sell them to you, as opposed to when there really isn’t an incentive in your fiduciary.
Our four main tenets of this company are access, transparency, fiduciary responsibility and community. But when you’re that fiduciary and you don’t have the commission based incentive, the access to things just open up because, let’s just look at whatever no one’s paying to be in here, we call pay to play. People are just have access to whatever is available, and then it’s up to us to vet it. But the access to it is there. Absolutely.
Why is this really that important?
I mean, it’s very important because these strategies make significant differences, Commission aside. And I’ll talk about the Commission later. But from a you know, a general strategic standpoint, private markets tend to Outperform public markets. Again, if you situate if you look at private equity returns, for example, as a whole, they tend to Outperform public markets. So you’d think I’d like access to that now that is constrained to people that may be accredited investors or qualify purchasers. And those are people that are, you know, one or 5,000,000 dollars.
So they’re situational. But even those people we’ve had call us to ask us for access to private deals that we’re doing because their major warehouse is not offering them the those solutions and they have a appetite for it. They want it, but they don’t have access to it. Another reason I think it matters is because there can be tax implications to those things. So you may be able to buy a real estate investment, be a limited partner, and that would give you a passive income deduction.
So if you have rental properties, but you don’t necessarily want to be a landlord to another one, but you want a little bit of that tax headwind of all that passive income taken away, you can invest and something that can take away some of that tax. And while still making money, you know, you’re not taking a hit. You’re simply investing in something as a tool you have access to. That will give you not only a nice return, but a deduction that you can take on your taxes.
Most places aren’t going to take the time and thought to find access to those things and present them to you, because quite frankly, they don’t make money on them, and neither do we. We’re paid by the client fully. That’s how we make our money. And we’ve put the solutions in front of them that we feel are most appropriate to them. And that type of access, to answer your question, may say significant difference in terms of building overall wealth, good returns, but also we we get to keep the wealth that you make.
And before you talked about private markets versus public markets and historically can deliver some really impressive returns, can you give an example of access to private markets that you may have versus a broker dealer?
I don’t want to go into too many names because I don’t want people to steal my secrets. But I will say that over the past 20 years of being in this industry, the relationships we’ve developed with private companies, other family offices, you know, what have you they have developed in some of the people that you even work with that you’ve introduced us to have developed into great sources of deals. And so we’ll have an opportunity. I’ll throw one name out there that everyone knows. But SpaceX was a huge success from the standpoint of wow really raised some eyebrows.
We have people calling from probably every reputable Bank that you can think of or an investment Bank or wealth management firm asking for access to it. And just almost like befuddled that we had access. But it came through the relationships that we’ve cultivated and developed over that 20 year period of time and really kind of making sure that, again, this is appropriate for the client. So it’s not like we just throw it into everyone’s portfolio. You have to be accredited or qualified in certain cases. But the success of being able to access it is shown out time and again by these people that have relationships with big private banks and whatnot still coming back and wanted to see our deal flow because they simply don’t have access to it.
Let’s dig a little bit deeper into that. How does Family Fortune Financial get this type of access?
So we have again, it goes back to the relationships that we’ve cultivated. And I’ll give a complete shout out to the company that we work with, Auto Monia Group for introducing us to some of these people as well. We have girth. So when you have girth and you have the ability to go out and feel ill, I would say certain deal sizes, the deal flow continues to come because they know that you’re going to be able to put in some odd million of dollars in each deal, and that type of reliability opens more and more doors, and that relationship expands.
And that type of relationship is very significant to them because, again, we’re not charging anybody money. So it’s just clear, Hey, this is great. We’re just doing deals, and we’re not trying to take advantage of any of the clients. Take advantage of the fun company you need to pay us. We need to pay none of that. It’s just clean, it’s easy. And that’s, I think, why people like to do business with us. Also, when you talk about working with larger institutions, the amount of capacity they have is almost too big.
So they become their own worst enemy because they might get access to it. But then that’s limited. And it only goes to those top people as opposed to kind of democratizing it and allowing people that qualify for it to have access to it. We’ve had people that have 15, 20, 50,000,000 dollars come to us. Again, that’s a lot of money, but they don’t have access because they’re not big enough. So we play in this Arena where we have good deal flow. It’s built out for those relationships.
And it really kind of hit that sweet spot for a lot of people where they may not want to put in, like, two or 5,000,000 dollars themselves, but in a digestible chunk, they could put in, say, 100 to 500,000 and really meaningfully invest in some of these companies that no one else has access to.
Investments
Most of this conversation has centered around investments, but does access go beyond investments? Absolutely. A private market investment is just a tool, the same way that investing in Apple is a tool, in the same way investing in real estate is a tool. They’re just tools to grow your wealth. You’re trying to grow it in as quick of a pace as possible, but also, keep as much as you make.
So I think access to professionals that are collaborative is just as important because they are going to help you hone in on the strategies: the legal, tax, and insurance tools, that complement the strategies that we are doing from an investment standpoint. I find it really interesting that there is a collaborative professional, they’re not just all the same. You can have a very smart CPA, but if they don’t collaborate, when the time comes for you to ask “What type of estate planning strategy should I use, I’m selling my business.” They won’t have the answer, because that question is going to span more than just tax.
Or, “Hey, I’ve got 40 or 50 million dollars. How do I best get that to my kids or charity?” They are not going to have an answer because that question is bigger than tax. The same way that if you asked me I wouldn’t have an answer because the answer is bigger than investments. But what I do have is access to very collaborative, good individuals that span the nation. We work with estate planning attorneys in Los Angeles, Florida, Charleston, we work with a law firm that spans the whole east coast. I’ve gotten tax information from New York attorneys on December 27th that meaningfully impacted a client and their investments and what they were going to do.
Those types of things, if you’ve got collaborative professionals, it really doesn’t matter where they are. You just need to be very good and very collaborative, and if people have a chance to listen from a transparency standpoint, we do include them on the team a lot of times. They are constantly working to make sure that the plan we put in place, like we are held accountable for what we put out there, but you need access to those people.
Not people that are just like, “I’m going to get you the lowest tax possible”, but that they are going to say “We’re going to grow your wealth as much as possible.” There’s a difference in that answer. I don’t want low taxes, I want wealth that grows. I don’t mind paying taxes, as long as my wealth is growing. If we are just not paying taxes and that’s the goal, there’s a lot that can be hidden and honestly stolen from you if that’s your benchmark.
Well obviously access adds significant value to the relationships here at Family Fortune Financial.